Making Time for your Creative Dream

It's easy to let our creative dreams become something that we put on the back burner as something that we will do in the future. We file our ideas away, intending to get around to them and yet we somehow never do.  Life gets in the way, we may have family commitments, our jobs to go to, household chores to get on with.

The thing is, we will always put off doing what we love if we continue to fill our time with other things.  We say things like, 'I don't have time for that right now'.  We don't realise as we sail through our days that we have just become hard wired to our routines.  We fill up our 24 hours with everything else and feel pressed for time, we feel stressed or depressed, and our dreams seem further away than ever.

I want to tell you a short story about me, and how I found myself in this exact situation.  I found myself feeling depressed that life wasn't the way I wanted it to be, and at the time I didn't understand that things were that way because of the way I thought, and how I lived my life.  I put my creative dreams on the shelf, thought to myself 'I'll get around to it someday' but that day never came, and the years ebbed on by.

I never challenged my mindset which was wired up to believe that there weren't enough hours in the day, there wasn't enough money, I was living in the wrong place, it wasn't fair.

I drove myself deeper into depression with these beliefs, not realising or knowing at the time that I had the power to change them, and turn my life around.  I simply thought that some of my creative dreams were just not meant to be, I had become a drifter living each day in the same way, doing the same things and then wondering why nothing changed.

And then I learnt how to change my mindset.  

It started off with me finding gratitude in the everyday instead of finding fault, and then writing down what it was I really wanted to do with my life.  I discovered as I wrote, that I wanted to teach and create art courses, I wanted to write a book, and to live by the sea.  It felt exciting to get things onto paper, in black and white, and that feeling of excitement was the catalyst for me to take tiny steps each day to move closer to my dreams.  

Writing down your creative dreams can help you discover your purpose, and when you discover this you will feel your spirit ignited with something that to me feels like Christmas Day as a child, that wonderful warm excitement in the very soul of your belly.

Some of my big dreams are already in progress, I am hosting my first art workshop in November, where I will get to teach people how to paint and create something really special!  Some of my other dreams will take a little longer, like moving to the coast, but the fact is, these days I make time to focus and work on these dreams and by doing that I am guaranteeing that they will be a definite feature in my future rather than just an idea in my mind. 

So, how do I make time to work on my creative dreams, and what do I do?

• I schedule time into my planner for working on my Vision Book (full of pictures I've taken from magazines that represent what my future life looks like).  Creating a visual map that I can refer to is a great way to envision my life - see where you can free up twenty minutes in your day to do this.
• I make time to meditate and visualise my creative dreams, and to imagine what it feels like to be doing and having all the things I want in my life.
• I write in my journal, and I count my blessings for everything I already have in life. 
• I make plans to achieve things by taking tiny steps each week, and committing to doing them. 

We can all make time in our lives to work towards our creative dreams if we really try.  For me, I noticed that I was wasting a fair bit of time on Social Media, or just watching TV in the evening so now I use that time more effectively by committing to taking an hour out to read books, listen to podcasts by motivational speakers, to write in my journal and so on. 

By doing this I know I am moving forward, I'm building confidence and knowledge.  These tiny steps will eventually add up and create the cumulative effect of a dream realised, and although it is taking time I'm OK with that - knowing that I'm making space to work on building my dreams gives me a great boost of endorphins and happiness, and I know that in a year or two I will look around and my life will look very different.  I will have achieved things I didn't think were possible, and so, don't be put off by how long it might take you - better that you start off doing something small and building your creative dream into your life now rather than doing nothing at all and still being stuck where you were a year or so down the line.  Schedule in the time, make yourself accountable, commit and do it - it's the only way to build traction and move forward - we have to take action in order for things to change.

What can you do today to take the first steps towards making time for your creative dream?  Let me know in the comments, I'd love to hear from you.